Montreal restaurant week: Taste Mtl eats away at menu prices

Brothers Benjamin, left, and Benoit Lenglet’s Au Cinquième Péché on St. Denis St. will serve a $39 menu featuring two choices per course: diners can choose between starters of poutine with seal merguez and marinated trout with fried smelts, then either a duck or fish main course, and one of two desserts. A late-night menu, starting at 10 p.m., will also be offered: the poutine and a glass of red wine for $19.John Mahoney
/ The Gazette

Chef Alonso Ortiz of Pintxo, which serves modern Basque cuisine in the form of tapas-like dishes. The Roy St. E. resto will offer a $39 market-based menu.Marie-France Coallier
/ The Gazette

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About 100 restaurants, from high-end establishments to bistros and wine bars, tapas places and BYOBs, have signed on for Montreal’s first city-wide restaurant week, an initiative of Tourism Montreal.

Most are concentrated in the downtown, Old Montreal, Plateau Mont-Royal and Mile End areas, but there are some in neighbourhoods including Verdun, Ahuntsic and Rosemont.

The first edition of Taste Mtl, as the event is known in English, will feature special fixed menus at three price points: $19, $29 and $39 — although not every price point at every establishment. In some cases, this is “very much less” than a meal would otherwise be, said Charles Lapointe, president of Tourism Montreal, so it’s an opportunity for people to try restaurants they might have wanted to visit but haven’t gotten around to. The menus generally feature three courses and there’s almost always an element of choice.

Some of the participating restaurants — Europea, Les 400 Coups and Toqué!, for instance — are already booked for the duration of the event, which begins Nov. 1 and runs through Nov. 11. (Technically speaking, then, Montreal’s first restaurant week is 11 days long.) But spots at plenty of tables are still available.

For a list of restaurants and their often inventive Taste Mtl menus, go to www.tourisme-montreal.org/mtlatable. Establishments can be located easily by neighbourhood and cuisine as well as by name and, in most cases, reservations can be made online. (The majority of the restaurants will continue to make their regular menu available.)

An event such as Taste Mtl can be viewed as “a good opportunity for restaurants to build up a new clientele,” Lapointe said.

It’s also a convenient time for restaurateurs to offer menus at lower prices than they otherwise would. “The beginning of November is usually a quiet period,” he said.

And Montrealers are nothing if not passionate about food. In a 25-page special section about the city’s food scene in the June/July edition of National Geographic Traveler, Montreal writer Taras Grescoe wrote about everything from smoked meat to Toqué!, maple syrup to bagels, Les Touilleurs to Joe Beef, poutine to Olive + Gourmando. (An accompanying app for the magazine’s feature, also called A Taste of Montreal, can be downloaded for free at the App Store.)

“When you say food to a Montrealer, it’s not just about the eating. It’s about the culture,” wrote editor-in-chief Keith Bellows, a native Montrealer, in introducing the magazine’s section. “A meal here is a gateway into how we live; it’s how we understand life.”

Organizing a restaurant week was part of a strategic decision to promote the city through gastronomy, Lapointe said — a decision made in consultation with the Montreal chapter of the Quebec Restaurant Association and the co-operation of the restaurant community.

The first restaurant week was held in New York City in 1992, in “a goodwill gesture to the 15,000 reporters coming to cover that year’s Democratic National Convention,” event co-founder Tim Zagat observed in a 2010 post at TheAtlantic.com. Many cities have since launched their own version.

Restaurant weeks in cities including New York, Toronto, Vancouver and San Francisco were looked at, Lapointe said, as was the one in Brussels: the Belgian city celebrates different food and beverage métiers each year — brewers one year, for instance, bakers another. Montreal, which has its share of fine bakers and microbrewers, is “looking at ways of expanding in the future. ... We could make the month of November the month of gastronomy,” he said.

Taste Mtl has “very strong co-operation from the SAQ,” Lapointe said. The event will feature four wine-tasting events organized by the government-run liquor board. In addition, a series of activities to showcase food and dining will take place. Guided culinary tours are planned in several Montreal neighbourhoods, as 5-à-7 gatherings, including tapas. The cost is $35 per person, and reservations can be made through the Tourism Montreal website.

Suppers in six Mont Royal Ave. restaurants lit only with candles will take place Fridays through Sundays during Taste Mtl. And on Nov. 1 and 2 between 6 and 8:30 p.m., an installation made up of 500 candles will light up Place Gérald Godin, just outside the Mont Royal métro station. Go to mont-royal.net for details.

For now, Taste Mtl is likely to draw more locals than tourists, since November is not a great month for tourism. But there has been a “quite important” surge in visits to the website from such places as California, New York City and Boston, Lapointe said — particularly since the travel guide Lonely Planet this month named Montreal as one of its top 10 cities to visit in 2013.

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